Scotia Nightmare!

We love hardwood floors, so during the tender process we allowed for a flooring upgrade.
In preparation for our two meetings to select finishes and colours, we visited Di Lorenzo twice to look at carpet, hardwood flooring and tiles. At our first Home Options meeting last week, we were required to choose our interior colours and finishes for kitchen and bathroom vanities, but to do that we needed to have considered flooring i.e. will our colour and finish selections work with our flooring? Eden Brae's process of choosing wall colours etc., first seems 'arse about' to me. I would have thought you build your palette of colour and finishes from the floor up. As a print designer this makes sense and speaking to friends who are interior designers only confirmed my thinking. The right process is incredibly important to good design.

Scotia! Aghh!
When talking to the sales people at Di Lorenzo about hardwood flooring options, we were told that we would need to select scotia to run around the edges of our kitchen cabinetry. To say we were shocked is an understatement. On further investigation, we discovered that Eden Brae's standard practice is to install the kitchen first and then lay the floor – whether it be tiles, a floating floor or a hardwood floor.

Scotia

Scotia is therefore required to finish off the edges because an allowance has be made for the floor to expand and contract. Tiles on the other had can be cut for a tight fit and finished with grout and caulking.

When you speak to flooring experts however, best practice is to lay a hardwood floor first. Then other trades can walk on the floor to fit out the internals. No protection of the floor is required, because the floor is sanded and finished once the internal fit-out is complete. This results in the very best result and removes the need for scotia, which looks bloody awful!

Scotia installed around an island bench in a Metricon display home. Let's be honest – it looks crap!

A hardwood floor (i.e. strip flooring) can bear the weight of a kitchen. We have some conflicting advice on engineered floors – most experts say an engineered floor can not bear the weight of a kitchen whereas we know of one supplier who claims it can. Whatever the case, we do not want scotia ruining a beautiful kitchen.

We have spoken to our Customer Service Administrator (CSA) about this issue and have been advised that Eden Brae will not change their process. I can only guess that Eden Brae is totally geared towards the investment market with 70% of clients investors who would select a standard floor inclusion i.e. tiles. We will be writing to management on this issue, but if anyone has any insights it would be appreciated.

I hope I don't sound like a whinger but attention to detail is the difference between an average job and a great job, the difference between ordinary and quality. Eden Brae I am sure would consider themselves to be a quality builder but on this issue, their process is wrong. As I said above, process is critical to good design and it is also critical to quality building.

What is really disappointing is that the use of scotia was not made clear during the tender process. We were very clear that we were interested in a hardwood floor. I believe we should have been told that the floor would be laid around the kitchen not on top of it. We just assumed that the job would be done properly. We assumed wrong.

If you have your heart set on a hardwood floor and want the job done properly…choose another builder.